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THE FINER GRAIN

By Henry James

1910

[Transcriber's Note: After posting it was discovered that there were several
missing pages from the section titled "Mora Montravers". This section has been
removed and will be replaced as soon as possible.]

CONTENTS

The Velvet Glove

[Mora Montravers]

A Round of Visits

Crapy Cornelia

The Bench of Desolation

"THE VELVET GLOVE"

I

HE thought he had already, poor John Berridge, tasted in their fulness
the sweets of success; but nothing yet had been more charming to him
than when the young Lord, as he irresistibly and, for greater certitude,
quite correctly figured him, fairly sought out, in Paris, the new
literary star that had begun to hang, with a fresh red light, over
the vast, even though rather confused, Anglo Saxon horizon; positively
approaching that celebrity with a shy and artless appeal. The young Lord
invoked on this occasion the celebrity's prized judgment of a special
literary case; and Berridge could take the whole manner of it for one of
the "quaintest" little acts displayed to his amused eyes, up to now, on
the stage of European society albeit these eyes were quite aware, in
general, of missing everywhere no more of the human scene than possible,
and of having of late been particularly awake to the large extensions of
it spread before him (since so he could but fondly read his fate) under
the omen of his prodigious "hit." It was because of his hit that he
was having rare opportunities of which he was so honestly and humbly
proposing, as he would have said, to make the most: it was because every
one in the world (so far had the thing gone) was reading "The Heart of
Gold" as just a slightly too fat volume, or sitting out the same as just
a fifth act too long play, that he found himself floated on a tide he
would scarce have dared to show his favourite hero sustained by, found
a hundred agreeable and interesting things happen to him which were all,
one way or another, affluents of the golden stream.

The great renewed resonance renewed by the incredible luck of the
play was always in his ears without so much as a conscious turn of his
head to listen; so that the queer world of his fame was not the mere
usual field of the Anglo Saxon boom, but positively the bottom of the
whole theatric sea, unplumbed source of the wave that had borne him
in the course of a year or two over German, French, Italian, Russian,
Scandinavian foot lights. Paris itself really appeared for the hour the
centre of his cyclone, with reports and "returns," to say nothing of
agents and emissaries, converging from the minor capitals; though his
impatience was scarce the less keen to get back to London, where his
work had had no such critical excoriation to survive, no such lesson of
anguish to learn, as it had received at the hand of supreme authority,
of that French authority which was in such a matter the only one to be
artistically reckoned with. If his spirit indeed had had to reckon with
it his fourth act practically hadn't: it continued to make him blush
every night for the public more even than the inimitable feuilleton
had made him blush for himself.

This had figured, however, after all, the one bad drop in his cup;
so that, for the rest, his high water mark might well have been, that
evening at Gloriani's studio, the approach of his odd and charming
applicant, vaguely introduced at the latter's very own request by their
hostess, who, with an honest, helpless, genial gesture, washed her fat
begemmed hands of the name and identity of either, but left the fresh,
fair, ever so habitually assured, yet ever so easily awkward Englishman
with his plea to put forth. There was that in this pleasant personage
which could still make Berridge wonder what conception of profit from
him might have, all incalculably, taken form in such a head these being
truly the last intrenchments of our hero's modesty. He wondered,
the splendid young man, he wondered awfully, he wondered (it was
unmistakable) quite nervously, he wondered, to John's ardent and acute
imagination, quite beautifully, if the author of "The Heart of Gold"
would mind just looking at a book by a friend of his, a great friend,
which he himself believed rather clever, and had in fact found very
charming, but as to which if it really wouldn't bore Mr... Continue reading book >>